News
We’re Aiming Higher!
25th August 2010
Independent Local Solutions is a Community Interest Company owned by the Rotherham Children, Young People and Families Voluntary Sector Consortium. As the trading arm of the Consortium, ILS facilitates collaborative working between Consortium members, and quality assures all partners with whom we work. ILS works up bids for contracts, and then serves as the accountable body, monitoring and managing the contracts we win on behalf of the Consortium members. This leaves the Consortium members to do what they do best – delivering excellent services.
ILS has been operational since May 2009 and has recently won its first large scale contract, valued at £311,000, to deliver weekday evening short break activities for children and young people with disabilities in Rotherham. Of 22 bids submitted, ILS is the only new service provider to win a contract and the local commissioners of Aiming High for Disabled Children in Rotherham were delighted with the range of activities we are able to offer through our local Consortium members.
So what’s that got to do with VCS organisations in Doncaster, you may ask?
In a nutshell ILS would like to facilitate a similar partnership arrangement with local groups in Doncaster to devise and deliver an Aiming High short breaks project in Doncaster.
ILS is confident that it could pull together a proposal of interest to the local Commissioners, if local groups with an interest in delivering such a service are willing to collaborate and help work up the details of an innovative and cost effective project, using their local knowledge.
ILS is not trying to trespass on anyone’s territory or tread on any toes. Nor are we seeking to take contracts away from local groups. Rather, we want to help local groups to bid for larger scale contracts by facilitating collaborative working. Indeed, the birth of ILS in Rotherham reflected a concern to defend the interests of local service providers against big bidders coming from outside of the borough to snatch the big contract opportunities available.
Of course, it is true to say that local groups in Doncaster have the opportunity to work together without ILS. But ILS is a legal entity, purpose built to identify contract opportunities and to facilitate collaborative working. ILS is prepared to invest the time and energy to pull a project together, at risk, in a way that an individual organisation can rarely do. ILS is equipped to monitor and manage contracts and ensure that all partners have service level agreements to specify their contributions to any particular project we run. To create a similar organisation to ILS in Doncaster would require significant investment of time and money, and we’re saying “you don’t have to incur those costs – just talk to us, and let’s see what we can do together”.
So – if any organisations are interested in collaborating over an Aiming High for Disabled Children bid to deliver short breaks for disabled children and young people in Doncaster, please get in touch with ILS. Ring 01709 912422 to chat with Phil Rees, Chief Executive of ILS, or email phil.rees@ilscic.com. You can check out our website at http://ilscic.wordpress.com/.
We look forward to hearing from you soon.
